What We’re Reading This Summer

We asked a few readers at The Times, including our three staff book critics — Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai — about what they’re planning to read this season. Here’s what they said.

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This summer I plan to catch up with two writers. The first is Eve Babitz, whose memoirs “Eve’s Hollywood” and “Slow Days, Fast Company” I could hardly admire more. Counterpoint Press has issued two others, “Sex and Rage,” a novel, and “Black Swans,” a book of stories. They are already in my weekend bag, tucked beneath my man-Spanx. The second is the English writer Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), better known as Saki. I came upon one of his short stories, “Tea,” in a stellar anthology titled “Stories From the Kitchen.” It was so exact and funny and modern that I immediately double-clicked on “The Complete Saki,” in a fine-looking Penguin edition. DWIGHT GARNER

I’ve squirreled away a few things to read this summer, but nothing so excites me as a recent edition of that huge, gory, beautiful brick of a book called “Classic Crimes” (1951), by William Roughead, an amateur criminologist called the Henry James of true crime — and who was, in fact, very much admired by James. Roughead was one of those great Edwardian hobbyists; he attended almost every important murder trial in Scotland for 60 years, and the dispatches collected here (I haven’t been able to resist a quick rummage) are full of dry wit, suspenseful courtroom scenes and, above all, a deep, almost majestic wisdom about human psychology. PARUL SEHGAL

I feel like this question is cornering us into taking a busman’s holiday, and what I really want to know is what my colleagues are planning to watch over the summer. To that end, I want to see the “Patrick Melrose” mini-series — but only after reading the original novels by Edward St. Aubyn, which I’ve resisted so far, mostly out of sheer stubbornness. Reading about louche rich people sounds about as appealing to me as reading about louche rich people, but readers I trust insist that I’ve been missing out. Also, I’m always curious about screen adaptations of recalcitrant books, and St. Aubyn’s material sounds challenging, to say the least. JENNIFER SZALAI

I have read Edward St. Aubyn’s extraordinary Patrick Melrose series — but I intend to revisit it this summer, when I’m not reading improbably complicated mysteries and unlikely psychological thrillers. I know it might seem obvious to mention the Melrose novels now, since they’ve just been made into a Showtime series, but there’s no way the dramatization can be anything as good as the books. I devoured them in one great long gulp several years — they are enormously funny, as well as harrowing and upsetting — but I did not take enough time to admire the clarity and brilliance of St. Aubyn’s prose. That’s what I’ll do this time around. SARAH LYALL

I recently read a conversation between the writers David Mitchell and David Peace, in which they spent some time going back and forth about their favorite Japanese novels. Inspired by their enthusiasm, I went out and bought a small pile of the books they mentioned, as well as a few others, and hope to get through them consecutively at some point this summer as a kind of self-guided seminar. I’ll start with Kobo Abe’s “The Woman in the Dunes.” Its plot may sound grim, about a man invited by villagers into a pit of sand from which he can’t escape, but Mitchell has called the experience of reading it “never less than compulsive.” Sounds summery enough to me. JOHN WILLIAMS